Hedgehogs are declining rapidly across Europe due to habitat loss, road traffic, and garden hazards. Simple garden modifications significantly benefit this beloved but vulnerable species.
Hedgehog conservation is unusual in the degree to which individual householder decisions aggregate to population-level consequences. A single household that creates a hedgehog highway, removes pond hazards, stops using slug pellets, and provides supplementary food makes a measurable contribution to local hedgehog welfare and survival. The cumulative effect of millions of such decisions across a city or country is demonstrable at population scale. Hedgehogs face a welfare crisis driven by the sum of individual human actions — primarily garden management, road infrastructure, and farming practice — that is uniquely amenable to individual-level intervention. The hedgehog highway movement has created a tangible community infrastructure connecting private gardens into hedgehog-friendly networks, demonstrating how local action can aggregate to meaningful scale.